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Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print

media brands in a French context

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DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008

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Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect

Journal of Business Research

Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media

brands in a French context
Rita Valette-Florence a,⁎, Virginie De Barnier b
a
Pôle Licence Gestion, UPMF & CERAG, Grenoble, France
b
IAE Aix-en-Provence, CERGAM, Aix-Marseille University, Researcher Wesford Business School, Grenoble, France

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: This paper reviews within the marketing field the concept of brand personality, its different available
Received 1 July 2011 measures and its main limitations. Hence, the study proposes to make a distinction between macro and
Received in revised form 1 October 2011 micro approaches of brand personality. Then a quantitative study in the field of print media brands is
Accepted 1 November 2011
performed on 780 respondents and 24 publications. The results show, firstly, the advantages of the micro ap-
Available online xxxx
proach for studying a specific sector. Secondly, the findings indicate the operational validity of the approach
Keywords:
pursued in this research, particularly concerning the capacity of the brand personality concept to predict con-
Print media brands sumers' self-identification to the brands.
Brand personality © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Micro vs. macro approaches
Brand identification

1. Introduction Careful examination of the literature reveals that the dimensions

Ever since Plummer's (1984) original paper, practitioners use the
concept of brand personality as a key element in brand positioning
and differentiation strategies. Nowadays numerous advertising cam-
paigns throughout the world reflect this managerial emphasis, with
advertisers no longer hesitating to personify their brands. Brand
anthropomorphism (Keeley, 2004) occupies a prominent position in
ads, as M&M's impertinent and funny characters are a revealing ex-
ample. Thus the brand acquires a position of strength insofar as its
personality is a protection against the growing leveling of products
by emphasizing its advantages and the consumer benefits deriving
from it. The creation of a real brand personality is therefore part of
the search for an original and relevant positioning, distinct from
close concepts such as brand image or brand identity.
On the academic front, researchers have become interested in the
concept of brand personality (Aaker, 1997). Various studies have
been carried out around two main themes, one concerned with
measurement and the development of measurement scales, the
other related to the validity of the construct, with research on the
links between brand personality and brand relationships. Neverthe-
less, some authors emphasize the limitations of such studies, particu-
larly as regards the measurement items, since the methodologies
employed yield scales that are either overly “global” – so-called
“holistic” scales – or overly “reduced” in terms of the product category
being investigated.
⁎ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: rita.valette-florence@upmf-grenoble.fr (R. Valette-Florence),
Virginie.De-Barnier@iae-aix.com (V. De Barnier).
for the same scale may vary from one country to another (Aaker,
Benet-Martinez, & Garolera, 2001). The same applies to different
fields of application, whether they be, for example, tangible goods
brands, services brands, country brands or even website brands.
Within the field of the study of social values, Reynolds (1988) made
the distinction between macro and micro approaches. The former
are dealing with universal cross cultural social value inventories,
whereas the later deal with specific and more precise value driven be-
haviors. As for brand personality, and by analogy, on the one hand,
one might thus envisage a general purpose macro approach dealing
with large cross-categories of products. On the other hand, one
could focus on a micro approach, depending on the field of applica-
tion concerned. Such a position, developed in the first part of this
paper, would enable an integrative framework reconciling the two
types of perspective to be developed.
These considerations lead on to another question: For a specific
brand domain, is the micro approach suitable to uncover specific
brand personality traits? The second part of the paper endeavors to
answer this question. Firstly, a personality scale in a new marketing
field, that of print media brands, is formulated. Print media brands
are newspapers, magazines or any publications titles that are so
well-known that they may be considered as real brand names and
may develop brand extension strategies (e.g. Elle or Vogue). Recent
research shows that such brands have personality traits that are
distinctively their own (Valette-Florence & De Barnier, 2009). Fur-
thermore, in a highly competitive environment, newspaper and mag-
azine managers constantly try to build links between the reader and
the publication concerned. Thus the predictive power of the concept
of brand personality on consumer's self-identification to the print

0148-2963/$ – see front matter © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008

Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
2 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
media brand is examined. Finally, a comparison is made between this
new micro measurement scale and other macro scales so as to identi-
fy the specific characteristics of each.
2. Theoretical framework
This section develops two points. The first aims to define the
concept of brand personality and to analyze the main criticisms that
have been leveled at it. The second is to develop the micro vs.
macro conception of brand personality.
2.1. The concept of brand personality and its limitations
Aaker (1997, p. 347) defines the concept of brand personality as
“the set of human characteristics associated with a brand”. This defi-
nition, although having the advantage of clarifying the concept for the
first time, is subject to many criticisms, particularly in regard to its
overly vague and “catch-all” character (Azoulay & Kapferer, 2003).
Apart from the problem of formulating a clear and generally agreed
definition, “it seems necessary to question the validity of the ontolog-
ical concept of brand personality” (Ambroise & Valette-Florence,
2010). In this perspective, it is important to revisit the criticisms
leveled against the concept of brand personality, in order to have a
clear view of it. These criticisms mainly concern the problems related
to the generation of the items, semantics, the interpretation of the
dimensions, and areas of application.
The first limitation concerns the problem associating with the
generation of the items. Wee (2004) points out that most studies of
brand personality are based on a transposition of theories of human
personality to the area of brands and the use of “crude” measurement
tools originally developed to measure human personality. From the
outset, Aaker (1997) already emphasizes that not all human person-
ality scales were systematically applicable, and that it was necessary
to develop others more adapted to the context of brands. Subsequent-
ly, in an Italian context, Caprara, Barbaranelli and Guido (2001), show
that a human personality scale could not be directly transposed to
brands. In response to this point, various authors (e.g. Ambroise,
2006; Özsomer & Lerzan, 2007) develop scales with measurement
items generated from qualitative studies of brands themselves in-
stead of transposing human personality traits directly to brands.
The second limitation concerns the measurement items and the
semantic problems they present. Although the scale developed by
Aaker was entirely new and receives wide acceptance, the scale
nevertheless suffers from certain limitations, particularly from the
standpoint of the interpretation of some of the items (Azoulay &
Kapferer, 2003). In this respect, these authors point out that the
items of the “Competence” dimension in relation to intelligence and
cognitive abilities should be excluded, as too should items relating
social class, since these do not concern the personality but other (cog-
nitive or social) areas. Further, they stress that the adjectives should
not directly refer to gender, for example, “Masculine” or “Feminine”,
though this does not exclude measuring a feminine or masculine
orientation (as may be suggested by items like “Delicate” and “Sensi-
tive” or “Aggressive” and “Dominating”). In fact such items recur in a
recent study by Grohmann (2009), who proposes a scale for specifi-
cally measuring feminine or masculine brand personality orientation.
The third limitation concerns problems associated with the struc-
ture of the scales and the interpretation of the dimensions. Thus
Aaker's original 5-dimensional structure does not always receive
empirical support. For example, in a Korean context, Park, Choi, and
Kim (2005) create a 4-dimensional scale and in Canada d'Astous
and Boujbel (2007) develop a 6-dimensional scale. Next, Aaker's
(1997) findings show that while some human personality factors
are found in brand personalities, this is not the case for all dimen-
sions. In this respect, Yoon, Gutchess, Feinberg, and Polk (2006)
show that the neuronal structures revealed by modern brain imaging
Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
techniques which are deployed in the evaluation of brand personality
are different from those used in assessing a human personality.
In most studies using Aaker's (1997) original scale, the authors
reduce the number of items so as to obtain an acceptable factor struc-
ture (e.g. Koebel & Ladwein, 1999; Park & Lee, 2005). This practice,
justified on statistical criteria, is nevertheless open to criticism in
terms of the stability of Aaker's (1997) original scale. Similarly,
some scales seem to be overly restrictive in that they contain too
few dimensions and items (e.g. Chang & Chieng, 2006; Geuens,
Weijters, & De Wulf, 2009; Sung & Yang, 2008). Finally, the personal-
ity traits identified by Aaker (1997) are exclusively positive, whereas
other authors such as Ambroise (2006) have included negative
elements such as the brand's “Misleading” character. For example,
d'Astous (2000) points out that, in the case of retail outlets, social
environment, atmosphere and design factors may be negative and
annoying. Sweeney and Brandon (2006) also stress the importance
of taking negative aspects of brand personality into account.
The fourth limitation, which particularly concerns us here, per-
tains to the area of application and the intercultural field. Aaker's
(1997) original scale uses the same tool for measuring brand person-
ality in different areas. Yet, as d'Astous and Lévesque (2003) show,
retail outlets have their own unique specificities, e.g. through having
sales personnel, which justifies creating an appropriate scale for this
area. Furthermore, in their study, Venable, Rose, Bush, and Gilbert
(2005) make clear that the brand personality dimensions vary not
only according to the cultural context, but also to the marketing
application context. In terms of the creation of scales, there are
some items that are specific to the application in question, for exam-
ple “Compassionate” for charitable associations (Venable et al., 2005),
“Chauvinistic”, “Snobbish”, “Spiritual” and “Religious” for the person-
ality of countries (d'Astous & Boujbel, 2007), or “Flashy” and “Garish”
for websites (Chen & Rodgers, 2006).
Finally, for the Aaker's scale, another limitation arises at a seman-
tic level, since some dimensions seem to be associated solely with
American culture (e.g. Koebel & Ladwein, 1999; Sung & Tinkham,
2005; Supphellen & Gronhaug, 2003). In this regard, Aaker et al.
(2001) reveal the dimensions of specific brand personalities in Japa-
nese and Spanish contexts. Such differences refer to the emic and
etic approaches referred to in cross-cultural research. The emic ap-
proach stems from the idea that people's attitudes and behaviors
can be understood solely within a specific cultural context (Usunier,
1998). The etic approach, developed by Pike (1966), considers that
there are universal principles independently of cultural contexts.
The emic approach justifies the research position, which involves de-
veloping a tool that is specific not only to the French cultural context
but also, and especially, to the chosen area of investigation, as the fol-
lowing section makes clear.
2.2. Macro vs. micro approaches to brand personality
The terms macro and micro were first applied to two specific
approaches to the study of social values in social psychology
(Reynolds, 1988). The first, known as the macro approach, sets out
to measure social values through inventories of values that are as
exhaustive as possible. The approach developed by Schwartz (1992)
is now largely recognized within the academic community. In mar-
keting, however, in the analysis of specific consumption practices, a
more detailed approach based on the values sought in the consump-
tion of a specific product class seems to be better (Aurifeille & Valette-
Florence, 1994). This conception, termed micro by Reynolds (1988),
considers that the specificity of each area of investigation calls for
a targeted study and that the use of overly generalized inventories
is inappropriate.
This epistemological question also arises in relation to the concept
of brand personality. For consumption practices are imprinted with
characteristics that are both cultural and linked to product categories,
 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx 3

thus raising doubts as the universal nature of brand personality in-
ventories. At a cultural level, for example, Aaker et al. (2001) reveal
brand personality dimensions specific to countries such as Spain or
Japan compared to the USA. Furthermore, the various adaptations of
Aaker's scale to France (Koebel and Ladwein, 1999) fail to reveal the
original structure found in the United States.
An exhaustive review of studies on brand personality shows that
many of them have been carried out in the last few years and in a va-
riety of different areas, as Table 1 below shows. Holistic approaches
encompass a large number of product categories, including or not
print media brands. On the opposite, specific approaches focus on
a particular product class, such as for instance, services or precise tan-
gibles goods. Since Aaker's (1997) seminal paper, the field of brand
personality study has rapidly grown in various sectors, thus helping
to humanize a tangible product, service, company, retail channel or
communication medium brand. Services (banks, restaurants, etc.),
retail chains (Carrefour, JC Penney, etc.) and communication media
(newspapers and magazines, websites, etc.) become brands in their
own right (Kapferer, 2007) with their own specificities, thus justify-
ing the need to define brand personality measurement scales adapted
to the particular sectors they address (Venable et al., 2005).
The various scales, of which the items and/or dimensions are
hardly comparable, suggest that measurement of brand personality
depends on the area of application. The recent attempt by Geuens et
al. (2009) to develop a personality scale applicable to many product
classes and different cultural environments results in a scale with a
very reduced number of items (12 only) and consequently suffers
from relatively weak predictive and nomological validity (around
12% at most).
In general, global or holistic approaches are viewable as a macro
form of brand personality, for which different brand domains are
grouped together, such as tangible goods, services, the media and tel-
ecom operators in Aaker's (1997) scale. The second approach is asso-
ciated with the micro character of brand personality and offers a
viewpoint specific to the area studied, as in Chen and Rogers's
(2006) scale for websites. This view amounts to considering that
brand personality may be understood at two, potentially complemen-
tary levels. At a macro level, it involves looking for cross-cultural and
inter-category product dimensions, of which the Geuens et al. (2009)
scale is the most recent and revealing example. At a micro level, the
study of brand personality takes place within a quite specific area of
investigation, leading to the generation of items or dimensions not
necessarily found in macro inventories. In this respect, certain areas
such as websites or print media brands may share dimensions or
items. Furthermore, personality scales specific to a given area may
have a larger or smaller number of dimensions or items than more
global (macro) approaches.
Consequently, the micro approaches may have the main advan-
tage of providing product relevant and culturally sensitive brand per-
sonality measurement scales. An illustration in a specific area, that of
newspaper and magazine brands, is hence offered in the next part
of the paper.
3. Creating a specific personality scale for print media brands
Readers of print media brands may attribute personality traits to
newspapers and magazines (Valette-Florence & De Barnier, 2009).
In this research, using a triangulation method and by means of 4
stages of traditional as well as projective qualitative studies, the
authors obtain a list of 121 personality traits specific to print media
brands, thereby consolidating the micro approach to brand personal-
ity. From these 121 items, a quantitative stage is carried out in order
to develop a print media brand personality scale applicable to a
French setting. The predictive power of print media brand personality
on readers' identification with their preferred titles is then
established.
3.1. Selection of newspapers and magazines
The newspapers and magazines are chosen on the basis of three
complementary considerations. First, publications with substantial
circulation figures are selected, circulation being defined as the num-
ber of copies printed within a category. Second, pairs of relatively
similar publications are included so as to be able to compare them
in terms of their target readership and highlight any possible differ-
ences in terms of personality. Two similar titles selected are, for ex-
ample, the women's magazines Elle and Marie-Claire. And third,
publications belonging to the same category but with very different
formats are chosen as, for example, TV Magazine and Télérama. A
total of 24 publications are selected (see Table 2).
3.2. Questionnaire and sample size
The questionnaire was administered by means of an automated
multimedia procedure on the Internet for rapid, direct collection of
information, thanks to a private panel company. The questionnaire
was based in part on the 121 brand personality items (Valette-
Florence & De Barnier, 2009) and in part on the variables of
Salerno's (2001) brand identification scale. For greater relevance of
responses, readers' loyalty to their publication was assessed during
the survey. As well as the standard variables (gender, age group,
socio-professional category), readers were chosen on the basis of dif-
ferent ways of acquiring their publication: subscription, direct pur-
chase, gift or loan.
Table 2
List of mass circulation French print media publications selected.
Media category Media focus Media title

National daily papers Le Monde, Le Figaro

TV listings TV magazine, Télérama
Women's Fashion Elle, Marie-Claire
Table 1 General Femme Actuelle, Psychologies
Construction and applications of brand personality measurement scale⁎. Magazine
Health Top Santé
Approaches Aaker scale's Other scales' Number of
Cooking Cuisine Actuelle
applications applications studies
News News l'Express, Le Nouvel Observateur
Holistic With print media brands 4 1 5 General Paris-Match, VSD
Without print media brands 7 3 10 Economics Capital
Tangible goods 30 11 41 People Voici, Gala
Services 10 7 17 Leisure Cinema Ciné Live
Specific Geographic places 2 2 4 Travel Géo
Organizations 1 4 5 Sport L'Equipe (National daily paper)
E-products and E-services 3 5 8 Decoration Art & décoration
Arts and entertainment 1 0 1 Family Parents Parents
Total 58 33 91 Seniors Notre Temps
Men's Fashion and charm Entrevue
⁎ Based on the terminology proposed by Keller (2008)

Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
4 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx

The final sample was composed of 780 respondents, of whom 41%
are male and 59% female. The mean age was 33, varying from 18 to
80 depending on the publication. In addition, the socio-economic dis-
tribution is balanced between professions. All respondents answered
the 121 questions with regards to only one publication. Items were
presented as 6 point Likert questions. All in all, each publication had
at least 30 respondents (ranging from 31 up to 72).
3.3. Construction and validation of the scale
The analyses are carried out in the standard way in two successive
stages. The first is based on a principal component exploratory factor
analysis through a process of successive iterations (elimination of
variables with a low factor loading) to reduce the number of initial
variables. Following this stage, eight fully identifiable dimensions,
comprising 27 measurement variables and accounting for 78% of
total variance, are retained.
The second stage is based on a confirmatory factor analysis to
validate the structure established in the previous stage. Analyses are
conducted for all publications combined. In addition, analyses per-
formed for each publication separately (by means of a PLS approach
due to some small sample sizes per titles) point out the same scale
structure. The model's goodness of fit (after bootstrapping) to the
data is based on the main fit indices recommended in the literature
(RMSEA = 0.072; GFI = 0.91 and AGFI = 0.89). The construct validity
(or convergent validity), reliability (or internal consistency) and dis-
criminant validity are then calculated to establish the specific quality
of each of the scale's dimensions. Finally, after a series of sequential
tests, comparison of free models and constrained models (where
the correlation between two latent variables is set to one) consistent-
ly shows that the free models statistically improve the fit of the pro-
posed model to the data. In addition, we also checked that the
heuristic proposed by Fornell and Larcker (1981) is formally met,
each dimension sharing more variance with its measures than with
the others dimensions it is correlated with. Discriminant validity is
thus formally proven and ensures that the latent variables are clearly
different from each other.
Finally, in order to uncover a second order factor structure, an
exploratory principal component analysis is first performed on the
first order factor scores. According to the structure matrix obtained,
a second order confirmatory factor analysis then allows to confirm
three second order factors. Consequently, the results reveal a
structure of eight dimensions of order 1 and five dimensions of
order 2, as Fig. 1 shows. Three dimensions of order 2 (“Respectabili-
ty”, “Charm” and “Conviviality”) bring together only 6 order-1 vari-
ables. The last two order-1 variables (“Disingenuousness” and
“Assertiveness”) remain independent and with the three previous di-
mensions of order 2 form an overall structure of 5 dimensions.
The proposed scale meets the various criticisms raised above.
Unlike most previous scales, the scale here is based on a qualitative
study stemming directly from brands instead of transposing human
personality inventories as such. The 121 initial items are all validated
by experts so as to ensure their relevance in the context of the study
(Valette-Florence & De Barnier, 2009). The specific field of investiga-
tion of print media brands (the micro approach) allows to obtain
a large number of items (27), all of which are re-usable for other
studies in this area. By contrast, Aaker's (1997) scale, derived from a
macro approach, has to be consistently reduced and modified when
applied directly to specific fields of investigation.
The factor structure of the print media brands personality scale in-
cludes a dimension of negative valence, “Disingenuousness”, placing it
within the stream of certain previous studies (Ambroise, 2006;
d'Astous & Lévesque, 2003) that also encompass negative dimensions.
Finally, using a micro approach ensures that both the cultural and con-
tingent specificities of the area of application are fully taken into ac-
count, thus responding to the fourth limitation previously referred to.
Nevertheless, over and beyond these theoretical considerations,
the predictive power of this new measurement tool needs to be
verified at a more managerial level.
3.4. Predictive power of print media brand personality
The concept of brand identification and customers' identification
(Salerno, 2001), which enables the relational proximity between the
reader and the publication to be measured, is deployed as the central
element of the analysis. The two dimensions of this scale were vali-
dated by a confirmatory factor analysis. Nonetheless, the influence
of personality traits still needs to be compared to a more traditional
global evaluation measure. To this end, we have adapted the scale
proposed by Batra and Ahtola (1990) to the context of print media
brands. The unidimensionality of this scale was confirmed by a confir-
matory factor analysis.
Taking all the publications together, the predictive power of brand
personality is on average 20.5%, whereas the predictive power of a

Print media brands

personality scale

Respectability Disingenuousness Conviviality Assertiveness Charm

Wisdom Conventionality Disingenuousness Natural Agreeableness Assertiveness Seduction Elegance

Reasonable Conservative Deceitful Relaxed Pleasant Assertive Seductive Refined

Posed Traditional Lying Spontaneous Friendly Exigent Glamour Elegant
Respectable Arrogant Jovial Congeniality Determined Fashionable Classy
Pretentious Critical Charming Stylish

Fig. 1. Print media brands personality scale.

Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx 5

global evaluation measure is only 1.5% on average. These figures print media brands, it is still appropriate to compare this approach
clearly attest to superiority of the concept of brand personality for un- with a macro approach. We shall do this in the following section.
derstanding the basis of the relationship of readers to the publications
they read. To refine these results, a further analysis of some of the 4. Comparison of micro and macro approaches
publications (Capital, Télérama, Voici, Elle, Le Monde and L'Equipe)
is carried out, by means of several stepwise regressions based on Three main studies deploy macro brand personality scales, with or
the first order factor scores as independent variables, comparing the without print media publications. The following section analyzes
predictive power of brand personality on identification with the these studies and compares their psychometric qualities. The last
readership. part of the section compares Ambroise's (2006) scale, which proves
The results in Table 3 reveal the capacity of the dimensions of the to have the best psychometric qualities, with the previously con-
scale to predict both identification with the brand (“this magazine/ structed print media brand scale.
newspaper suits me”) and identification with the readership (“I
share the same values as the readers of this magazine/newspaper”) 4.1. Construction of brand personality scales using a macro approach
for each of the publications selected.
For the six selected publications, the predictive power varies From the perspective of a benchmark brand personality measure-
between 11% (for Elle and Le Monde) and 53% (for Voici). The weak ment tool, a number of studies use Aaker's (1997) original scale. Al-
predictive power of brand personality on identification for Elle and though based on sizeable data collections – four successive stages
Le Monde testifies to the fact that brand personality is not the only with a large number of respondents and brands –, it suffers from a
element accounting for identification with the brand or the reader- number of drawbacks, most of which have been already mentioned
ship. For both these publications other elements such as involvement in this paper, particularly the difficulty of using it in a cultural envi-
or the sign value of the publication probably influence identification, ronment other than North America. More recently, following the
whereas for Voici, a less involving publication, personality has a many criticisms of Aaker's (1997) scale, Geuens et al. (2009) propose
higher predictive power. Research on the emotional field associated a new scale with a view to making it applicable to all fields and to dif-
with the choice of newspaper or magazine by readers could no ferent cultural environments (ten European countries and the USA).
doubt provide some answers to these questions. Five large-scale quantitative studies, as well as several series of ex-
The results show that for each title, certain specific personality ploratory and confirmatory analyses, enable a new brand personality
traits have predictive power on the two identification dimensions. scale to be obtained.
“Assertiveness” strongly influences identification both with the Despite this impressive work, there are nonetheless certain weak-
brand and with the readership for readers of the magazine Capital. nesses in regard to the reduced number of measurement items, a fact
For readers of Elle, it is the dimensions “Natural” and “Elegance” that could partly explain – as the authors emphasize– the poor
that strongly influence the two components of identification. The predictive power of brand personality as thus measured on attitude
management of these publications needs to closely monitor on a reg- toward the brand. The new scale here includes practically none of
ular basis how these aspects of personality evolve in order to check Aaker's (1997) previously identified dimensions. Although this may
their stability over time. In essence, this study highlights the dimen- be explained by the desire for a universal scale, it nonetheless
sions of personality on which publication managers could focus in seems surprising. Two items (“Romantic” and “Sentimental”) are
order to increase identification with the brand or the readership. found in Richins's (1997) measurement scale of emotions and there-
Finally, although some dimensions such as “Wisdom” and “Seduc- fore would seem to be not easily comparable to the emotional stabil-
tion” seem not to appear, they do so if we remove “Elegance” and ity dimension of the Big Five model, as the authors point out.
“Conventionality”. This is due to the fact that “Elegance” and “Seduc- Ambroise (2006) implements a study with a view to creating and
tion” on the one hand and “Wisdom” and “Conventionality” on the validating a personality based on brands and in a purely French con-
other hand are correlated and depend on the same second order la- text. Following a qualitative study in several stages that generates 285
tent dimension (respectively, “Charm” and “Respectability”). Despite personality items, Ambroise carries out exploratory and confirmatory
having shown the pertinence of the micro approach in relation to factor analyses and obtains an order-2 structure comprising 5 dimen-
sions with 9 order-1 facets bringing together 23 items, as Fig. 2 below
shows.
Table 3 To date, this scale seems to be the most successful in a French con-
Influence of dimensions of personality on identification. text. Indeed, it has interesting psychometric qualities. Subsequent
Identification with the brand Identification with the
studies have confirmed the stability of the structure of this scale in
(0.59a; 0.89b) readership (0.79a; 0.92b) the evaluation of 50 brands from 12 different product categories
(tangible goods brands, retail chain brands, bank brands). In theoret-
Publication R2 Dimensions R2 Dimensions
ical terms, it appears that the structure and semantic content of
Capital 40% Assertive character 23% Assertive character
the brand personality scale are consistent with general theories of
Conventionality
Natural personality and previous studies on the transposition of this concept
Elegance to the realm of brands. In managerial terms, several empirical studies
Télérama 37% Pleasant 44% Attractive carried out by Ambroise have in particular demonstrated the predic-
Natural Misleading character (−) tive power of this tool on consumer behavior. The following part of
Pleasant
Elegance
the paper compares this measurement tool based on the macro ap-
Voici 53% Attractive 42% Misleading character (−) proach with the print media brand measurement tool based on the
Misleading character (−) Assertive character micro approach.
Assertive character
Elle 16% Natural 11% Natural
4.2. Comparison of macro and micro approaches to brand personality
Elegance Elegance
Le Monde 12% Misleading character (−) 11% Misleading character (−)
Pleasant Pleasant A close look to Ambroise's scale reveals that some order 1 or 2
L'Equipe 25% Misleading character (−) 14% Pleasant dimensions of the specific print media brands scale are similar to
a
Convergent validity. those of Ambroise, namely “Disingenuousness”, “Agreeableness” and
b
Joreskog's rho. “Seduction”, thus confirming that newspaper and magazine brands

Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
6 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx

Brand personality
barometer

Introversion Agreeableness Conscientiousness Sophistication Disingenuousness

Conscien- Precocious- Deceitful-

Introversion Congeniality Seduction Creativity Originality Dominance
tiousness ness ness

Endearing Resourceful Organized Hypocritical Parvenu

Reserved Charming Trendy Classy
Pleasant Creative Meticulous Lying Arrogant
Shy Seductive Modern Stylish
Friendly Imaginative Serious Deceitful Pretentious

Fig. 2. Ambroise's (2006) brand personality scale.

are therefore genuine brands able to evoke the same personality traits
as other brands. Other facets such as for example “Assertiveness”,
“Conventionality”, “Natural” and “Wisdom” are more specific, corrob-
orating the validity of the micro approach for the creation of a new
personality scale suited to print media brands. Furthermore, to our
knowledge, none of these facets or dimensions has been proposed
by other brand personality inventories.
More specifically, the facets “Conventionality” and “Wisdom”,
represented at order 2 by the “Respectability” dimension, express
readers' respect for their preferred publications. “Assertiveness”
reflects the degree of firmness of the positions adopted by specific
publications in regard to the topics addressed in their editorial col-
umns. “Natural” refers to the sympathy conveyed by the publications
toward their readers.
In regard to the measurement items, Fig. 3 below shows, on the left,
items specific to print media brands and, on the right, those belonging
to other brand areas. The overlap of the two circles in the middle
contains items common to both the macro and micro approaches.
A micro approach to brand personality allows more specific per-
sonality traits to be obtained in particular sectors, such as newspaper
and magazine brands. The macro approach is more general and there-
fore suffers from the lack of items specific to the area studied. We see
that only 10 items out of 40 are common to the macro and micro
approaches, a rate of 25%, which is similar to the 30% of items shared
by the micro and macro approaches to social values (Jones, Sensenig,
& Ashmore, 1978). This finding reinforces the idea that there is cen-
tral core of personality items applicable to several product categories,
shared for some of them with the items of the micro approaches spe-
cific to a given area. In general the similar dimensions “Disingenuous-
ness” and “Agreeableness” belonging to the two scales seem to
represent the brand's negative and positive facets.
Does this conception refer to the “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” charac-
ter of the brand, or in other words simultaneously to the attraction
the brand exerts on the consumer and the suspicion it arouses
(Klein, 2000)? In fact, further studies are necessary to extend the pre-
mises of the present results in order, on the one hand, to identify
items common to the micro and macro approaches and, on the
other, to evaluate their respective predictive validities.
5. Conclusion
This paper, based on an analysis of previous academic studies on
the concept of brand personality, allows to put forward an integrative
framework by contrasting macro approaches with their general scope
and micro approaches focusing on a specific area of application.
The paper's area of investigation, newspaper and magazine brands
provides a concrete illustration of the micro perspective. Thus at a
theoretical level, the findings clearly confirm the possibility of

« Micro » « Macro »
Reasonable
Posed Reserved
Respectable Hypocritical
Pleasant
Conservative Resourceful
Classy
Traditional Imaginative
Stylish
Relaxed Endearing
Friendly
Spontaneous Shy
Print Media Charming
Jovial Organized
Brands Congeniality
Seductive
Arrogant Meticulous
Assertive Serious
Pretentious
Exigent Creative
Deceitful
Determined Trendy
Lying
Critical Modern
Glamour Parvenu
Fashionable
Refined
Elegant

Fig. 3. Comparison of the macro vs. micro approaches of brand personality.

Please cite this article as: Valette-Florence R, De Barnier V, Towards a micro conception of brand personality: An application for print media
brands in a French context, J Bus Res (2012), doi:10.1016/j.jbusres.2011.12.008
 R. Valette-Florence, V. De Barnier / Journal of Business Research xxx (2012) xxx–xxx
characterizing print media publications by specific personality traits
and dimensions that until now did not exist in other brand personal-
ity inventories. They also reveal the advantage of focusing on a micro
approach if one wishes to identify more than just brand personality
traits in a specific product category.
This study of brand personality and its measurement offers a new
definition of brand personality: Brand personality is an evaluation
based on human personality traits applicable and relevant to the
brand and cultural context in which they occur. The micro approach,
which fits perfectly into this definition, should thus lead to greater
operational scope for the concept of brand personality, and more
particularly as regards the three effects of brand personality on
consumer behavior already identified and highlighted by researchers:
reduced research and information processing (De Chernatony, 1999),
better differentiation in relation to the competition (Plummer, 1984),
emotional satisfaction and a tendency to loyalty (a desire to continue
buying the same brand or its new extensions, including paying a
higher price) (Freling & Forbes, 2005).
At a managerial level, the creation and validation of a print media
brand personality scale through the micro approach offers two major
advantages: the more exact semantics of items, facets and dimen-
sions, directly related to the area investigated, give print media pub-
lication managers more focused action levers; the predictive power of
brand personality on explained variables, such as identification with
the brand, improved by a more detailed analysis of the scale, should
allow more effective strategies to be formulated for increasing
readers' loyalty to newspapers and magazines.
Like all research, the present study has its limitations, which
mainly concern the sample and the questionnaire administered
through the Internet which probably induces a bias toward an over-
representation of the higher socio-economic categories. Obviously,
the results also are limited by the number of the print media brands
encompassed. In addition, a new data collection procedure should
be undertaken as a means to confirm the scale structure and asses
its predictive power with regards to other dependent variables such
as for instance trust, attachment and loyalty. Ultimately, the benefits
of this specific scale should also be compared with those stemming
from broader macro brand personality scales.
A number of avenues for future research seem promising. First, it
would be interesting to extend this analysis to other media such as
television and radio and to see whether or not there are personality
traits specific to these areas. On the other hand, starting from existing
scales, such as the present print media brand scale or Ambroise's
(2006) scale, creating a hybrid personality scale jointly applicable to
different areas would be relevant. Such research could subsequently
help produce a better match for advertisers between brand personal-
ity profiles and the newspapers and magazines in which they place
their advertising.
In addition, further surveys have to be set up in order to formally
compare the predictive power of macro vs. micro approaches to
brand personality. Ultimately, at a more theoretical level, further
studies should try to uncover other concepts accounting for identifi-
cation with the brand or the readership, since for specific magazines
(e.g. Elle and Le Monde) the predictive power of brand personality
on brand identification remains rather weak.
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